Solitudes….

Just an attempt to wake this blog up again!

Manhattan, it was, again

Yet another weekend at Manhattan and like every other time, this time too, the city had a lot to offer which I had never seen before like, a street fair on the 6th Avenue which stretched all the way from 42nd Street up as far as eyes could go, winding its way through the buildings that stood tall and a presidential campaign amidst a completely unrelated procession.

And then there were places, I made sure that I never missed, every time I set my feet on this “rock”, such as the Bryant Park with its usual group of chess players and book readers, the New York Public library and its fair share of photographers and coffee drinkers and the central park, teeming with life, from street performers to caricature artists, mothers and kids on their daily dose of afternoon walks to tourists such as me, tracing a serene hiking trail around the park. Time stood still at these places, amidst the fast paced financial center that was build around them! An irony, I must say!

But one that requires special mention is the tunnel adjacent to the statue of the angel, beside the lake, at Central Park. I have spent a significant chunk of my time in this city, inside this tunnel, watching the street performers in action. Rumor has it that street performers who perform at some of the prime locations in Central Park are auditioned before letting them out to the public! I believe, this spot is one such. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why I have always liked being at this spot. There is something magnetic about this place which has always kept me glued to the spot for hours together. It must be the enchanting music that echoes through those architecturally elaborate walls and ceilings in the tunnel.

And this time too, the power of his voice just kept me enthralled.

And here is a shot from where I sat listening, almost a year ago.

Looking forward to yet another visit to this land, teeming with life……

Offbeat: Met up with Jaris and Cibin, who generously gifted me with a lens and a polarizer for my new camera. 🙂

And finally…

…. I got myself a DSLR ! It was a long wait. I had been looking to buy one ever since I came to US. Two years and two months later, I finally ordered one, purely on a Sunday morning impulse (irony intended!!).

Here is a highly distorted version of how it hangs in my room now….

Although I’m yet to explore the gamut of features that it has, here is the first shot in an unrecommended “Auto” mode with a 50mm f/1.8 lens!

What happens if you get hit by a truck tomorrow!

Over the past few years, throughout my grad school and my work right now, I have been exposed to a common term that lingered across every organization – Risk! As hot as the topic can be, risk management team is a group that is considered as an integral part of every company. Needless to say, there is a large group working just on the possible risks and their impacts, in my company too! As part of my daily work with the multitude of projects that run around me, I’ve had constant interactions with people from this specific group, which I guess is not uncommon in a company of this scale and business need.

But something that amused me right from the first day I started hearing about the term “risk”, since my graduate school years, was the fact that, from an individual standpoint, risk management is often looked upon as “What happens if you get hit by a truck tomorrow”! How can the possible impact (not the fact that you are hit by a truck) be minimized 🙂 At first I started hearing this phrase from just a single person and promptly decided to avoid that as a “trademark” analogy. But I soon realised that it was a common phrase used by a large number of people, all over the world – be it a company or a school!

Just an interesting observation 🙂

Labor day weekend at Maine!

It was a long weekend, and having been back to a working life, such weekends were much needed breaks! A few of us decided to spend it at one of the northernmost tips of the eastern side of America – Bar Harbor, Maine, at the risk of accidentally crossing over to Canada, if at all we lost way!

An overnight train to Boston was how the journey started, where I had to meet up with a few friends, before driving up to Maine. With Yiddish Policemen for company, I left Philadelphia at 12:30 am on Saturday. A seven hour journey, with an annoying 1.5 hour stopover at New York Penn Station in the middle of the night, finally got me to South Station at Boston early in the morning. From there started the journey to Bar Harbor, Maine through the Interstate-95, which was, by now, a familiar ground for us, from the trip down to Florida during the Spring break!

The landscape changed dramatically as we turned to RT-1, the road that took us to the tip. Saline winds that blew in from the sea and the bays amidst the tall mountains greeted us five hours later. We reached our destination, a quaint hotel looking out into the bay, with a fleet of ships docked on the banks.

With the sunset closing in, there was nothing much we could do that day except taking a stroll down the streets of Bar Harbor, watching life pass by as people went about their evening chores. It was indeed an irony that we saw the sunset at a place where sun rises the first in the whole of America! Something else that took me by surprise was that the place seemed to have more Europeans than Americans, evident from the fact that people on the sidewalks, walked on their left rather than right 🙂 !

By the time we got back to the hotel, we didnt have much time but to have a quick dinner by the bay side and sleep off, to wake up to a long day of mountain biking at Acadia State Park!

When we rented our bikes the next day morning, little did we realise that it would be as hard to ride a bike as it turned out to be. Having already set out in an adventurous mood, we decided to cycle down to Acadia State Park, rather than take the bus. Within minutes, we realised that it was not an easy task to cycle up the mountains, even with the multiple gears that the bike possessed 😀 .The 20 mile long sinusoidal trail that awaited us was mind blowing in its scenic beauty, passing through the ….

dense forests

and high mountains,

through restaurants amidst the mountains

and lakes shaped like eagles!

Soon we found that what was planned to be a leisure ride for a couple of hours turned out to be a six hour long ordeal and all of us were spaced wide apart, by the time we reached the final point! With burning knees and dehydrated bodies, we dragged ourselves back to the hotel. There was nothing much we could do that day other than just cool ourselves by the jaccuzzi.

The next day, being the last day of the “long” weekend, which went faster than expected, we had to leave early to get back to Boston! What followed was a race against time and traffic to get to Boston and then a bus journey to New York, before the last train to Philadelphia left New York and I got back home early on Tuesday morning!

The trip was also significant due to the fact that we have now scaled the entire stretch of I95 – the highway that ran along the east coast, passing through Maine and New Hampshire in the north, through North and South Carolina and Georgia, all the way till its end at the beginning of the Florida Keys!

More pictures of the trip can be found here

And here I am after a hungover Tuesday and an action packed Wednesday, waiting for yet another weekend. New York is the destination this time, to hopefully catch up on some US Open action!